Easy Landscaping Ideas

Easy landscaping ideas can bring color, shape and style to a disorganized, uninviting yard. If you don't have much time for landscaping but you want to make noticeable improvements in your front or back yard, explore easy ways to add detail and definition to the exterior of your home. Whether your landscaping ideas focus on adding color to your property, enhancing privacy or just spruce up a ragged lawn, you can find fast, easy ways to reach these goals by exploring online galleries and home landscaping magazines.

Before you plan your landscaping ideas, take a few minutes to evaluate the existing elements in your front or back yards. Landscape elements aren't limited to shrubs, trees, flower beds or fences. Your walkways, driveways, garage, garden shed, barbeque grill, even your trash cans form elements of your yard landscape design. Easy landscaping ideas can start by removing or relocating unattractive elements and replacing them with objects that are both appealing and functional. For instance, trash cans in a side yard could be moved to the garage and replaced with an easy shade garden.

Easy Borders and Edging

A yard can be more attractive, functional and visually interesting if you define the different areas of your outdoor space with borders and edging. Overgrown flower beds can be cut back and edged with flagstones, bricks, lava rock or lumber to define and delineate these areas. Plant a colorful garden around a tree or along a fence to draw the eye to these areas. Edging materials keep your flower beds free from leaves and hold mulch in place, so that your lawn isn't scattered with cedar chips and soil.

If your walkways and entryways aren't clearly marked, your front yard may have a blurry, indistinct look. Easy landscaping ideas can focus on marking off paths and porches with edging materials. Think of colorful edging ideas, like using rows of bright annual flowers to highlight a porch, deck or walkway. Edging can draw attention to the most visually appealing elements of your yard and make your landscaping neater, cleaner and more clearly defined.

Simple Ways to Add Color

A drab, dull lawn may motivate you to consider ideas for brightening up your property with color. If you don't have a lot of time for lawn care, think about replacing dry, parched grass with a colorful xeriscape, or drought resistant garden. Easy landscaping ideas for desert gardens include planting low maintenance cacti and succulents that produce brilliant red, pink and yellow blossoms. Red lava rock provides a richly hued ground cover for a desert garden. Accent the garden with rocks in different shades to lend color to your property without creating extra yard work.

Adding a flower bed to the front of your home is a simple way to enliven the property. Although planting tulips, daffodils, irises, dahlias and other colorful perennials may seem complicated, it's actually not difficult to plant bulbs in the fall. Once you've planted your perennial garden, you'll have yellow, blue, pink, red and orange splashes of color in spring and summer. With a little care and maintenance, you can enjoy these fragrant beauties for years.

Container gardening ideas can easily brighten up a patio, porch or deck. Easy landscaping ideas for a patio might involve terracotta pots overflowing with lobelia, petunias and marigolds. Place several containers along a balcony or porch for pops of color and bursts of fragrance. Container gardening is essential to your easy landscaping ideas if you live in a small townhome or apartment, but colorful containers can make larger properties more vibrant, too.

Easy Landscaping for Privacy

If you're looking for easy ideas to enhance privacy around your home, think about setting up fences or planting shrubs or trees. A freshly painted fence or a row of evergreen shrubs adds definition to your landscape and creates a boundary between you yard and your neighbor's property. Browse through your local nursery for easy landscaping ideas for evergreen or deciduous shrubs that will bring privacy and color to your yard.

In a friendly neighborhood, you may not want to install tall, forbidding fences or hedges, but subtle additions can add privacy to your easy landscaping ideas. Exterior structures like wooden lattice screens, arbors and gazebos obscure views of your property from certain angles without isolating you from other homeowners.

Easy landscaping ideas don't have to break your family budget. A colorful umbrella on a patio table brightens up your backyard and shields you and your family and guests from sunlight. An arrangement of affordable outdoor furniture makes your deck or porch a more inviting place to spend time. Simple touches like a row of annual flowers lining a walkway, a do-it-yourself sitting wall or bright container gardens on a patio make your landscape more interesting, appealing and enjoyable.

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